Wastelands
by Cossacks250
Summary: Just a quickie about a NOD member's perspective of a Red Zone, set before the beginning of the Third Tiberium War. Enjoy.


**Hey fellow FF readers and writers. This is just a quickie from the perspective of a NOD soldier in one of the Red Zones. Enjoy.**

Green. You get used to that after a while; a green sky that looks like pea soup; a charred greenish-blackish earth that looks like it's trying to decide whether to be a countryside paradise or just come out of a horrific war. But what stands out most about all of this were the crystals. Shiny, jade green in colour with a variety of sizes; some being as big as your thumb whilst others towered over you and the surrounding hills as if they were small mountains. Sometimes you would find blue ones scattered around in these places too. From my position on the top of a tiny hill (about forty feet high) I could see the glow of them far off in the distance about a mile away. In the almost everlasting darkness of the Zone of Paradise, as our great leader Kane calls it and what GDI wrongly refers to as 'Red Zone', the glow was hauntingly beautiful. It was beckoning to us. Even now I could hear its call.

I close my eyes and breath in the air … nice, sweet, radiated air (here comes my one-way trip with a tumour). My ears become tuned to the sounds of the world around me.

 _"Come to me. Greatness … power … freedom. It all awaits you."_

Wonderful! I smile to myself as I open my eyes and look out across the horizon to my left, my eyes immediately falling on the glow that came from that direction. It was slightly brighter today, probably because the number of crystals had grown _again_.

That thought strikes me hard and I pause mid-happiness and look melancholically at the floor. That was and is one thing about Tiberium that is difficult to stomach. It spreads very quickly, and I mean _very quickly._ When it had first crashed here in Italy before the down of the new century, humanity had thought they were able to contain it. For a while it was until we came along and wanted it to spread. Within a few decades, it covered what was once Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, Slovenia and parts of France and Sicily and even sections North Africa. By the end the 2020's, it was in the southern parts of Africa, Central and East Asia, Northern Europe. Heck, thanks to us, we managed to spread it into Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, the Americas and several Pacific islands. And it was all led by Kane, great, wondrous leader Kane.

But of course, it was coming at a bit of a cost. You see, Tiberium is highly radioactive. It makes Chernobyl look like a teddy bear's picnic. And it kills all living things pretty quickly when it's in an area. People, animals, trees, even the very ground itself begins to die. The blue of the oceans that had transfixed many a people was now grey, lifeless, devoid of beauty, of happiness, of mystery. All of these were as foreign to it as if they were the words of another language (rather strange considering that every type of spoken word from all corners of this planet had described the sea as such in their own tongues).

In short, life on our planet was slowly crumbling and the earth itself was ebbing away. And that makes it all the more important to accelerate this evolutionary dream Kane has promised us. I say _has_ and not _had_ because our quest to make it so continues. It can happen, and it will! It has to!

 _Though …_ I ponder reflectively at my surrounding once again, seeing the burned out and rusting cars, the crumbling edifices that had once been part of civilisation, the dead trees that dotted the landscape, the ruins of man's past and a sickening foretelling of what could become our future. _Though, I wonder if we will be able to complete our mission and fulfil the destiny of NOD in time._

But Kane will lead us. He's led us this far, right? After all, we have established ourselves as one of the dominant military powers in all the world, rivalled only by GDI. We have survived countless wars with them and Tiberium is weakening them. _Darwin was and still is right. The strongest survive here, and GDI have proven themselves to be anything but.  
_

Again, though, I hope that we will complete our mission before the earth becomes too overwhelmed. We all know how dangerous this material is and how much of a detriment to our infrastructure, our nature, our very way of life it is. If we do not act fast, then we could be doomed to extinction.

 _But we will prevail. We must. For Kane is the leader, and our Tiberium is power._

Tiberium is power.


End file.
